New Year’s Wishes. The Need for Renewal and Self-purification. This is Accomplished in Us by Spiritual Zeal

I congratulated you on the New Year in passing, but then it occurred to me to congratulate you specially and to wish you something particular. What exactly? That you might become brand new. New in what sense? In the way that any brand-new little dress is new: everything in its place, not a spot, not a wrinkle, with freshness wafting from it. This is what I wish for your soul. In body you are, as one says of a dress, just off the needle—completely brand new. But our soul comes into the world already with something old, and if this old thing is not taken from it, it will remain old, never tasting newness. The old thing in the soul is vanity and the passions. Drive all of that out—and you will become brand new.

I will tell you a certain tradition, and the matter will become clearer to you. Someone lived far away in the desert. His inward organs fell ill—whether the lungs, or the heart, or the liver, or all together. The pain was enough to die from. There was no human help to be hoped for; he had recourse to God with all-powerful prayer. The Lord heard him. One night, as he slept, he had the following vision: two Angels came with knives, cut him open, removed the diseased parts, cleaned them, washed them, and anointed them with something. Then they put everything back in its place, sprinkled something upon it—and everything knit together as if there had been no incisions at all. Awakening, the elder arose perfectly healthy, as if he had never been ill—as new as a young man in the full bloom of his strength. You see what I wish for you? That in your soul everything might be cleansed, that what is diseased and old might be cast out, that everything healed and renewed might be set in its proper place and sprinkled with living water. And you will become brand new, fresh, full of bright and joyful life.

I told this little story once to someone who was laboring over himself. After hearing it, he cried out with real feeling: “Oh, if only the Angels would come and do to my soul what they did to the body of that elder!” In that exclamation one could hear both prayer and the desire to shift onto others what ought to be done by one’s own labors. For such cunning is not foreign to our heart either—we are not averse to being good, but when it comes to laboring for the sake of it, our hands drop.

Angels will not come to cleanse and heal the soul. Their guidance and admonitions may occur in the course of this work, but everything must be done by oneself. All the means, or instruments, and medical tools have been given. Take them yourself and cut yourself wherever needed, without any sparing of yourself. No one else can do this. God Himself does not enter the sanctuary of the soul by His power, but graciously requests entry.

I am not asking you how you are disposed—whether to cleanse yourself or to shift everything onto others. You have not yet properly set about this at all. But when you do, I prophesy to you as well that more than once, and not as a fleeting wish, there will come to you: “Oh, if only the Angels would come and cleanse everything!” And yet the Angels will not take this up, though they be right there with you. The work of cleansing will have to be carried on by yourself, without pity for yourself. The one who accomplishes it in us is that life-giving zeal of which I wrote last time. It is both the knife and the scalpel, which works very well when sharpened by grace and guided by its promptings. It is also merciless when it takes up abode in the heart and cuts, not listening to the cries of the one being cut. For this reason the work goes quickly under it and soon comes to an end—for not everything is cutting. When everything has been cut away, zeal is no longer a knife but a guardian, and it turns all its fierceness upon the enemies of salvation—from whose importunity no one is free, and whose shamelessness never leaves anyone in peace.

You can see for yourselves that I entered into this discussion in order to inflame your desire to determine more precisely whether you have such zeal. For without it your spiritual work will not go forward. And if it is absent, the spirit is asleep—and when the spirit sleeps, there is nothing to discuss about the spiritual life.